[Trivia: how many of GM’s 4 brands can you name?]
I came across something the other day called “cobra farming.” The basic idea is that if you want to get rid of some harmful thing, and put a reward on people for every instance they eradicate, you might wind up incentivizing people to breed and multiply exactly that harmful thing you want gotten rid of. This may or may not have literally, historically happened in British-run India, but cobra farming was the term that got attached to this particular type of perverse incentive.
It’s also explained in this attractive cartoon:
Another (more mild, and more well-attested) example I recall reading about was some Dilbert fan mail that cartoonist Scott Adams shared in a book of his: one manager, to incentivize his programmers, put a bounty on finding and weeding out bugs in programs, something to the tune of $10 per. The program wound up being called off after one individual netted himself something like $2000 in a single week.
I haven’t been able to get this idea out of my head because it factors directly into an image of God’s providence. God is all-knowing, and also all-powerful, and also working things together for the good of those who love Him. Cobra farming is an example of a good intention, even a specific vector for good, winding up being totally counterproductive because of how it interacts with its environment and everything else going on in the world. It’s a reminder of how God denies good things from happening and may allow evil things because he has an understanding of future consequences and unpredictable interactions with everything else that’s going to happen. So I feel like that’s a reassuring concept to have in mind.
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Quick little Greek note on that verse that I alluded to earlier: for as much as I love Greek, and consider lack of ambiguity a hallmark of the language, that line in Romans actually is ambiguous.
Here’s the original Greek of the verse in question, Romans 8:28:
οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι τοῖς ἀγαπῶσι τὸν θεὸν πάντα συνεργεῖ [ὁ θεὸς] εἰς ἀγαθόν, τοῖς κατὰ πρόθεσιν κλητοῖς οὖσιν.
The couple of words in brackets mean “God,” but the brackets express textual uncertainty—basically, they don’t appear in all manuscripts, or only appear in later ones, and so might be a copyist’s “helpful” insertion rather than an original part of the line.
And in fact, some prominent translations eschew that as an insertion. After all, here (at last) is the relevant clause as rendered by the ESV: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good.” Even the KJV: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”
On the other hand, here’s the NASB: “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God.”
This line sticks in my memory as a really interesting example of the Greek itself being ambiguous: remove the textually spurious insertion, and it is undecidable whether “πάντα” (panta, “all things”) is the subject of the verb “συνεργεῖ” (thus, “all things work together”) or the direct object of the verb with “God” being understood (“God works all things together”). After all, the verb in Greek is “inflected” (meaning here that its ending has changed) to tell use that the subject of that verb has to be “he, she, or it,” a feature of the language that results in the subject often just being omitted if it’s clear from context who the “he” or “she” must be. It is an entirely clearer ballgame, in other words, than if English dropped subjects and published sentences like “Swims to the shore” as though the subject could be inferred from context. Further ambiguity comes from the noun: normally the noun’s (or substantive adjective’s) ending would signify whether it’s a subject or a direct object—but this word is neuter, a case famous for having (both in Greek and Latin) endings that are identical whether the word is the subject or object.
But what about “all things”, you might be wondering—isn’t that word plural? So a verb with a “singular subject” ending would have to not take it as the subject?
Yes. Except.
Neuter plural nouns in Greek were known to do that exact thing. Heck, as I’ve written about, a couple of neuter plural nouns that English took from Latin (media and data) are known to do that same thing in our own language. And that’s the direction that the ESV took things.
Ironically, this is all especially ambiguous because both versions of the proposition are true. We can’t bring what we know about the world in general to bear because we’re looking at one true thing or else a different true statement. So it all mostly just becomes a question about context—what point is Paul trying to highlight in that specific paragraph?
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Answer: Buick (the original one for the company GM), Chevrolet, GMC, and Cadillac.